Humanity of the Clones

[Darth Klingon]

While it's pretty obvious that the Clones were slaves, what I find even more intriguing is how genetic engineering tampered with their free will, and how it had different effects on different clones. Were they just indoctrinated and brainwashed into obeying all orders, or were their genes were so altered that their intelligence and free will was limited, or even wiped out?

[Stark]

Are you sure you don't find this 'intruiging' because if you could decide they had no free will because SPACE GENETICS it would make it ethically easier for you to accept how they were used? Is there any actual evidence they were genetically engineered to have no free will, or is this just something people invented because they just can't understand how the clones could have shot the Jedi?

You know how order 66 worked? The brainwashed a whole bunch of people to unquestioningly follow orders. It was all fun and games when the orders were good, or given by jedi, but when you give the dinner bell to the dark lord of the sith the dog will still salivate on command. If the jedi had used regular people as soldiers they wouldn't have been wiped out instantly, but because they used the horrific clone army, their sin was their destruction.

What's so hard to understand about this?

[The Romulan Republic]

I wasn't aware that nerd=secretly fascist.

It apparently does mean 'can't read', but Ive learned to expect convenient snap judgements too.

I wonder if they were inhuman though, not because of a lack of thought but because they were genetically engineered. How much would someone have to be altered to be non-human?

Is this you being not fascist? :v

He's saying they have no volition even though I'm not sure why this would be the case, and further saying that because they have no volition mistreating them is ok. Defining people as 'not human' so you can misuse them (but phrasing it a different way to feel better about it) is exactly the behaviour I'm talking about. It might be true; the Republic may have created a race of mules to die in their stead. This shouldn't be a thing people try to defend.

I think the laugh is that the Republic would obviously desire to dehumanise the clones because its convenient politically. Luckily lots of people are willing to agree and cheer along with the idea.

Stark, when someone points out that you said something stupid and offensive, that doesn't make them illiterate. But maybe you didn't mean to call nerds fascist. Could you clarify what you meant so my retarded fascist brain can understand it?

Also, speaking of snap judgements, you seem to think that since I question the clones' humanity I am okay with abusing them. This is not true. I believe that something that isn't human can have rights, especially in science fiction where sentient non-human creatures are common. I am not defending the clone army because I don't approve of it either.

[Stark]

I know attacking the messenger can be fun, but grow a fucking spine. I said

This is the sort of crypto-fascist stuff I have come to expect from nerds.

Notice the lack of the word 'all' in this sentence? You don't have to invent offence just because you don't like what someone is saying. I'm saying that over the last few years I've noticed that many nerds - particularly those on this board - display apparently unintentionally authoritarian attitudes. With this in mind, it doesn't surprise me nearly as much as it should that a guy can literally say BREEDING PEOPLE IN CAPTIVITY AND TRAINING THEM TO FIGHT AND DIE FOR RICH FOLK isn't slavery - because they're looking for a mental way to avoid thinking that sort of thing. It's ok - they're SUB HUMAN! They don't have RIGHTS! There's nothing unpleasant going on here! This is the part that bothers me - rather than internalising something negative and bad (which fits right in with the karmic retribution later meted out to the Jedi) - people want a 'science fiction excuse' for it. They had 'reduced free will' because of 'genetic engineering' and so - no harm, no foul.

Similar excuses have been used for horrific crimes before. Its not something that should be encouraged, and I won't encourage it. The clone army isn't a huge deal to me because I don't give a fuck about Star Wars, but when people are apparently looking for ways to 'make it ok' when something isn't ok, that's not great.

[The Romulan Republic]

Maybe you didn't say all, but you did claim that there is a connection between nerds and fascism and I don't know if that's justified. I doubt being a nerd makes someone more likely to have fascist tendencies.

But there is an authoritarian side of this board. I suspect this is partly due to its position in the Star Trek vs Star Wars debate, since it undoubtably attracted a lot of Empire lovers to this board.

[Stark]

I didn't say there was a connection at all. I said I had come to expect one. On reflection it shouldn't have surprised me that some socially isolated people admire strong central authority and have tribal responses. But honestly I don't care about your feelings; I only care about this idea that creating a slave race is bad if you're the gould from Stargate, but apparently ok if you're the republic from Star Wars. Its the idea that admitting the 'good guys' did a bad thing, or didn't consider it bad, is difficult that I find unfortunate. Somehow he wants to come up with an ethical formula whereby the Republic and the Jedi are absolved from any of this dubious business.

[Connor MacLeod]

It could be that the Republic wasn't quite the 'good guys' people believed in the PT. We knew as far back as TPM they tolerated slavery so long as it wasn't in the Republic (or at least visible within the republic, I suspect the Trade Federation practiced a form of slavery.) and as long as you were a squishy organic not born or bred for a specific purpose.

I mean you have to think that if Kamino existed and was known as cloners and they did shit like this for the Republic, they must have done similar (in military and probably nonmilitary venues) for others. And the way they acted and treated them were like commodities - it didn't really horrify me all that much on the first watching of AOTC, but over the years its grown a bit more chilling because how casually it is treated (which is why I didnt register it in the beginning.)

Besides there's also the not-so-subtle fact that the Republic to Empire transition was not some sort of massive changeover, it was a pretty smooth and subtle transition, and had probably become (literally) decades before. There's a certain irony that the Jedi had been defending and/or collaborating with a nascent tyranny without realizing it.

And I think its pretty obvious regardless of your source that the Clones are humans. They're humans that are enslaved, brainwashed and dehumanised for a particular purpose so that 'actual' persons don't have to do the messy work of dying

[Darksider]

I think the willingness of the Republic and even the Jedi to use the Clones as an army is an important indicator of how far the Republic has fallen as a civilization, of how far it has strayed from it's founding ideals and the past ages where Jedi were truly the protectors of the Peace. Part of the Tragedy aspect of the PT is that Palpatine's plan was only able to succeed because those principles were not followed even by those who were supposed to embody them the most. If the Jedi hadn't taken the easy path and accepted the Clones, and had expanded the Judical forces to fight the Separatists, like Stark said, the armies following them would have been made up of free-thinking men and women, as the Republic's armies had in ages past, Men and women who would've been able to realize that no, the Jedi are not traitors to the Republic and do not deserve to be exterminated. But because of their arrogance and detachment, because they had grown too focused on defending the Republic as a civilization rather than helping the people who made it up, they convinced themselves that they had to utilize the Clones as an army, that they had to take this questionable action, because the Sith were back, and if they didn't they would destroy the Republic and rule the galaxy. The revelation that the Sith were in charge of the Separatists made them focused on winning the war at all costs, because they had to defeat the Sith once and for all. Even though they were looking for another Sith Lord towards the end of the war, they were still too focused on Dooku and the threat he represented to see Palpatine poised to stab them in the back. Yoda has a sort of epiphany to this effect in the ROTS novelization when he's fighting Palpatine. The Jedi grew too stagnant, and became too willing to embrace questionable practices in the name of the greater good, and they paid the ultimate price for it.

[Stark]

Its ironic that the Jedi's acceptance of mindless slave armies (despite it appearing that Jedi did not consider them subhuman and actually dealt with them pretty equitably) directly led to their complete destruction. Palpatine must have known it was the kind of detail that the Jedi wouldn't think about - they weren't canny enough to think ahead to a time where the clones would be listening to an authority hostile to the Jedi. They used an evil weapon forged by evil people on the command of evil people, and in the end it betrayed them. If George didn't suck as a writer, maybe more people would have actually noticed instead of 'whoo battleporn'.

[Darksider]

I know it's never happened in any of the EU or the movies, but I can just imagine in my mind a conversation between Yoda or Windu, or one of the more principled Jedi leaders and Palpatine going something like this:

they're talking about the morality of the Clone Army, about disbanding it in favor of recruitment and conscription after Geonosis, about only using the Clones for as long as it would take to raise a regular republic army so that the Separatists don't crush them, and Palpatine responds with something about how the senate and the people of the Republic would never accept placing their sons and daughters in harm's way while there is an alternative, about how switching to a regular army when one is already prepared and fighting would give the Separatists the advantage they need to win the war.

The Jedi leaders put up a bit of an argument, but in the end they just accept it, because the Sith are leading the Confederacy and that makes them the greatest threat to galactic civilization in over a thousand years. Because if it's not feasible to make the morally correct choice and still save the Galaxy, then they have to do what it takes to stop them. The Jedi leaders grudgingly concede the argument to Palpatine and leave his office.

Palpatine simply smiles.

[Stark]

There were proper armies, right? It's just the federal army with Jedi that was clones, I believe. This makes it especially apt, because the Jedi's feeling of identity with the Republic means they served there, when in the other (local) forces they would have been safer from their PROGRAMMED EXECUTIONERS.

Palatine plays Jedi like fiddle, news at 11. :V

[Darksider]

I suspect there might have been some Palpatine-manufactured difficulties with conscripting the various planetary defense armies into a larger formal army for the Republic. IIRC, they didn't even conscript the various planetary defense fleets into the Republic navy until Palpatine was practically ready to declare the New Order. Palpatine probably brought up issues of factionalism within the Republic (I.E. why should a Kuati soldier die for Alderaan?) and logistics difficulties to enforce the idea that taking the morally correct path would give the Sith-led Separatists, I.E. THE ULTIMATE ENEMY, the advantage they needed to win the war and usher in a new age of darkness. He wanted his Clone Troopers in position to strike the final blow against the Jedi, and he perfectly manipulated the situation so that they were.

And the Jedi, completely focused on the Sith as an external threat to the Civilization rather than an internal one, would begrudgingly agree to sow the seeds of their own destruction.

Like you said, news at 11.

[Lord Revan]

Btw do we really know if order 66 was a secret from the jedi, to me it would reasonble that the wording be something like "if a jedi betrays the republic, a Jedi higher in the chain of command, the senate or the supreme chancellor can order the traitors troops are eliminate him/her eliminate at all costs" with Palpatine using his authority to make it the order apply to all jedi everywhere.

[Gunhead]

You don't really need Palpatine to do anything to see why slapping together an army to defend the republic from whatever forces are available is pretty much not going to happen. First obstacle is there doesn't seem to be any legal way for the republic to commandeer men and equipment in order to form any sort of army to fight under the banner of the senate. Assuming they have legal authority to do this or miracle vote one into existence it's a monumental task to organize a force like this and it's made nearly impossible if the governments forced to give up their ships and men are not feeling cooperative. If the governments do go along, you're stuck with a force of wildly varying capabilities and a supply nightmare of galactic proportions.

All this has to be done extremely fast without any real previous framework to base it on and to top it off, you just gave more political ammunition to factions providing the bulk of the men and material to the new army of the senate and this is not what Palpatine would want because it could undermine his political influence in the senate once the real shooting starts.
It's likely Palpy threw some wrenches in the works just to make sure the senate doesn't even consider the option of building an army from available forces and basically the clone army option sealed the deal, but even with him doing fuck all the idea of slapping forces together from all over, while feasible, is fundamentally flawed.

Having clones to wipe out the Jedi just simplified things for Palpy. With a non-clone force doing what he did would have required more planning and would have increased the risk of someone finding out, but at the end of the day I don't think the Jedi would have been safer in a non-clone army to a degree it would have mattered. The initial wave off assassinations was to damage the Jedi order to a degree it's command structure is fractured and Palpy can just sweep in and declare them all traitors. You can accomplish this by getting rid of relatively few individuals and in the short run the assassination doesn't need to succeed in killing them, it suffices you drive them into hiding and keep them there till you've established yourself and your rule. Then you go out and finish them off.

-Gunhead

[Stark]

Great fanfiction, but in the movies I saw they missed only two Jedi in the order and they totally destroyed the empire. Even assuming regulars would have killed 90% of their Jedi, it's pretty strange so say this would make no difference.

Not that this is relevant to the topic, of course.

[Darksider]

Another way that regular troops would've made a difference over conditioned clones, is that there is no way to guarantee that 100% of them would go along with the New Order. Someone who signs on to defend freedom and democracy might not necessarily turn into a Stormtrooper for the New Order just because the Senate voted it into being. I think that if they'd had Regular troops instead of brainwashed Clones, the Empire would have been on far shakier ground in it's formative stages. Remember that a significant portion of the non-clone Republic Officer corps went on to defect from the Empire and join the Rebellion. With a fully-regular army, there may have been organized military resistance to Palpatine's assumption of power rather than just a few scattered Separatist holdouts and Jedi-led rebels. On top of providing a method of wiping out the Jedi, the Clones and their conditioning provided a ready-made and completely loyal army to enforce the New Order.

[Connor MacLeod]

Using clones may have even been a deliberate psychological choice, to help paint the Jedi (and the REpublic) as being even more horrible with that whole 'slave military' thing going, especially given how oftne we observe (or in my case, have read) how they seem to get inefficiently used (huge casualties and all that.) Like at Geonosis. When you have a government that condones that kind of behaviour, backed by an equally distant and out of touch religious order, it becomes pretty easy to paint yourself as a better solution.

Just as we could view the Republic as being more insidious than it might seem superficially, the same is true of the Jedi. Sure in the movies we get them portrayed as such, but in the end their actions and their stagnant philosohpies contributed to Palpatines success, the Clone Wars, and the rise of the Empire. Especially people like Yoda.

There's even a kind of irony in that... Palpatine corrupting and weakening the Jedi morally and ethically so that they become a shadow of what they were and what they stood for, too wrapped up in their own little matters and philosohpies to be what they were originally intended to be.

[Darksider]

One of my favorite things about the PT era is the way Palpatine managed to set events up so perfectly, the way he managed to manipulate events, and really just Palpatine in general. Gunhead is missing the point of the discussion from a thematic perspective somewhat but there is some truth to what he's saying. Forming a cohesive army out of all the disparate planetary militias and Navies in a civilization as vast and outright disfunctional as the Republic would be a massive undertaking, wrought with factional politics and logistical nightmares. Just the sort of clusterfuck that would give the CIS a decisive advantage and possibly enable them to win the war.

Obi-Wan's capture on Geonosis also means that whatever shit is going to go down, is going down right now. Even if the Jedi did want to discuss the moral implications of using the Clone Army, there wasn't any time to do so because the Separatists had a massive army, and had just captured a Republic agent in their territory, so they could be poised to strike at any time. Palpatine's machinations (and a little bit of luck, for him anyways) created a scenario where the Republic needed an organized army immediately, not in the months it would take to form one from the forces they had available. Then, Lo and behold, an army is presented to them to act as their salvation, so naturally the Republic accepted.

Then in their arrogance, the Jedi fell in to the role of generals that the Jedi of old had been, failing to realize that their current peacekeeping philosophy left them unequipped to handle that role. And because they were ill-equipped for that role, the war demanded the entirety of their focus and effort, so much that they failed to look the Clone Army gift horse in the mouth. Maybe if the Jedi hadn't been so focused on fighting the enemy with the Clones, they would have realized they were using the Devil's tools, metaphorically speaking. They would have investigated the creation of the Clone Army, and realized that it was Dooku who paid for it.

[Joe Momma]

Are you sure you don't find this 'intruiging' because if you could decide they had no free will because SPACE GENETICS it would make it ethically easier for you to accept how they were used? Is there any actual evidence they were genetically engineered to have no free will, or is this just something people invented because they just can't understand how the clones could have shot the Jedi?

Some of the EU material stated that the standard clonetroopers had slight adjustments to their DNA to make them less independently-minded than their genetic template, but it was nowhere near the level of robbing them entirely of their free will. The clone commandos had even less adjustment to make sure they were more capable of independent action and the ARC troopers were not altered at all in that respect. So even the worse-case scenario the genetic alterations relevant to this only make the clones more susceptible to traditional indoctrination.

And FWIW the same EU material notes that clones that meet certain standards such as having worse than 20/20 vision simply disappeared, the obvious implication being that they were tossed in the fucking garbage. And the first group of independent-minded ARC troopers were going to be executed as children for being too disobedient until one of their trainers intervened and took personal responsibility for them. The clones being treated by the Kaminoans as property to be disposed of if they don't serve well enough is further evidence that they were considered slaves.

However, according to Wikipedia, child soldiers aren't considered slaves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_use_of_children

International labor law
Forced or compulsory recruitment of anyone under the age of 18 for use in armed conflict, is one of the predefined worst forms of child labour, deemed a form of slavery, in terms of the International Labour Organisation's Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999, adopted in 1999.

[Stark]

Were the commandos specifically designed to be commandos, or did they just pick the most commando-like clones from regular batches? All I know about them is what Obi Wan said in the cartoon (ie that he selected them because they were good) and they certainly showed more initiative and independence than many other clones, which might be 'genetics' or might be specific training and doctrine.

[Darksider]

Clone Commandos are actually something completely separate from the Arc Troopers in that episode, and according to the Novels, they were raised separately from the other clones, and trained specifically with their squadmates to form a bond.

Of course the shit he said about "defective" clones disappearing is blatantly contradicted by TCW, where a Clone who came out completely fucked up is given a job as a janitor on Kamino.

[Joe Momma]

Were the commandos specifically designed to be commandos, or did they just pick the most commando-like clones from regular batches?

I've read it both ways as far as the standard clone commandos (sometimes referred to as Republic Commandos to more clearly differentiate them from the ARCs). Some sources say they were designed that way, others said they were standard clonetroopers who showed above-average initiative and were funneled into commando training. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.

Most ARC troopers were specifically designed, or in the relevant respect here not designed as the qualities in question were unmodified from the original template -- their tweaks were only minor physical aspects such as slightly higher strength. However, IIRC even some of the standard fully-behavior-modified clonetoopers have distinguished themselves enough in ability and independence to be promoted to ARCs.

Given the signs of individuality that even the basic clonetroopers develop over time and the instances where some of them have been promoted to positions requiring a great deal of independent thought, it's pretty clear that whatever genetic alterations are being performed on them to enhance their loyalty and obedience are minor predilections rather than substantial innate limits on their free will. And FWIW some of the clone commandos and ARCs disobeyed Order 66 even after a lifetime of indoctrination.

Of course the shit he said about "defective" clones disappearing is blatantly contradicted by TCW, where a Clone who came out completely fucked up is given a job as a janitor on Kamino.

The "disappearing substandard clones" bit only appears in the novels AFAIK (haven't seen TCW) and is based solely on other clonetroopers' observations, so it's possible that the disappearing clones were sent off to do other labor and the clonetroopers in question simply never saw them again. Or it might simply be another case of the EU materials presenting contradictory info, in which case TCW would take precedence as a higher canon material (and frankly would make more sense, assuming using the substandard clones as basic laborers would be a better return-on-investment than simply recycling them).

[Adam Reynolds]

The "disappearing substandard clones" bit only appears in the novels AFAIK (haven't seen TCW) and is based solely on other clonetroopers' observations, so it's possible that the disappearing clones were sent off to do other labor and the clonetroopers in question simply never saw them again. Or it might simply be another case of the EU materials presenting contradictory info, in which case TCW would take precedence as a higher canon material (and frankly would make more sense, assuming using the substandard clones as basic laborers would be a better return-on-investment than simply recycling them).

The clones that were disposed of were likely less physically substandard and more disloyal. While physically substandard clones can be used in maintenance and other noncombat tasks, clones that show the seeds of disloyalty would likely be disposed of to prevent their ideas from spreading.

[biostem]

Didn't the Kaminoan leader state that at least part of the genetic engineering that the clones were subjected to made them more obedient?

And there is no doubt in my mind that the clones were slaves - they just weren't privvy to the necessary knowledge that they had any choice, and they were trained and conditioned to not question orders, (and I expand that to not asking questions about why they have to fight). Their exposure to free people, (besides the Jedi), was extremely limited, and it seems that communication with civilians, (like Padme), was similarly taught to only be combat-relevant.

If nothing else, it would be very hard to break this conditioning, but I'm assuming the longer a clone was out in the field, (especially if it was in a distant post where they did have contact w/ free sentients), the more likely they'd start to question their place in the world.

Another aspect would be how strict their conditioning would have been. I imagine that certain "castes" of clones, like the commanders or special ops ones, would need more free will and ability to adapt and improvise, in order to be effective in their roles. The rank-and-file troopers, OTOH, would probably be extremely regimented in both their training and the degree to which they would be permitted to socialize.

I mean, we saw clones sitting and eating in a very mechanical manner, so conversing w/ fellow clones was probably prohibited, (unless it was campaign-specific stuff).

[Batman]

Um-we see clones chatting in TCW all the damn time.